6 Small Business Tips for online strategies to help your small business more resilient to COVID shutdowns and recessions.
With all the digital tools available to small business and entrepreneurs – now is the time to use them to avoid losing your business to shutdowns and pandemic recessions.
Hey everybody. Welcome back. This is Vince and you’re listening to Breakthru Code. So my video today is about six top level strategies, tips, that you can use in your business to make sure that you can make it to the other side of this COVID scare and be prepared for the next one. There’s a lot of stuff that’s out there that’s probably saying things are going to come back maybe in the fall or the winter or next year, either way, small businesses can’t afford to just hope things get better. Small businesses and entrepreneurs are some of the most innovative, strong people, resilient people, that I’ve ever met. And I’m happy to be part of that group. So I want to share some things that are going to help you strengthen your business with the tools available right now in digital marketing, to make sure that you’re going to make it through there and you’re going to be strong on the other side, right after this.
So with everything that’s been going over the last couple of months, one thing that’s been very readily apparent is that it is so important for your business to be online, and for you to understand as the owner of your business, as a small business, a sole proprietor, or maybe the lead or the manager, whatever roles you fill with your business, to make sure that you understand some of the key elements so that you can help your business make it through the tumultuous time we have now and going forward. So let’s get right into that right now.
Number one, upgrade and renovate your business location, online I mean. Now whether you’re using a website landing page, or a social media site, as the main home for your business online, it’s very important to identify where can people know and trust that they can get updated information about your business, specials, deals, coupons, they can find out if you’re open or closed, or if you are pivoting and trying to deliver your product or service in a new and interesting way. I don’t know how many businesses I visited online over the last couple of months, some of my favorite vendors, restaurants, coffee shops, and I’m trying to see if they’re open, or if they’re partially open, and they don’t have any updated information. You literally have to drive up to some of them to see on the little written sign that they have under window, what their new hours are.
Take that written sign, and through the magic of internet and digital, you can actually put that online on your website, social media properties, you can create a brand new account if you needed to, you could send that out on your email list, which you should have, you can send it out in any number of ways to your customers, business partners, associates, other businesses. There’s so much that you need to be doing this. Google My Business is a very important one. I don’t know how many Google My Businesses that had the wrong hours or even the wrong phone number, maybe it was the landline at the business location, and instead they were taking calls on their cell phone. You need to update that across your business properties online. So update and renovate your online business presence.
Number two, what are your communication channels? Now what do I mean by communication channels? Make it very simple, how do you interact and communicate with your customers. And before, if the only way you are doing it is when they walked into your store and you said, “Hello.” You saw how hard that was after COVID hit, and a lot of people had to shut their businesses, or forced to close for a period of time, or even now they’re still closed some of them. And you weren’t able to communicate with your customers online.
So email list, it’s very important that whatever you’re starting to do now, and here going forward, that you start collecting emails, if you can, from your customers. You can do that a number of different ways, there’s tons of videos and information, and I’ll have more on that later. So start collecting emails, whether it’s through your social media sites, whether you’re doing that through your website, or even when customers come in, if you’re having them, have a little email list by your register or when your people take orders or you’re interacting with your customers say, “Hey, just give me your email, and I’ll send you an email update on what’s going up.”
You can even give them incentives like a coupon, or give them access to a special, or you’ll say, “Hey, I’ll let you know when I have that thing coming in and I’ll be able to send it directly to you. I can send it out and I’ll give you an online way to pay for that.” As I said before, most small businesses, the only way they’re interacting with their clients, is a signage on their window. And that’s really sad that in the digital age, with so much communication available to us, that you’re still not doing that. So take some time, and I’m not saying you have to do every single thing out there that’s available, but pick one or two things that you know, that you’ll be able to do. We have smartphones now, so you’re able to access social media accounts.
If you’re been in business for a while, your customers are going to know, like, and trust you. So it’s a great way to say, “Hey, given everything that’s going on…” They’ll especially understand now during COVID to say, “Hey, give me your email.” Reach out to them on social media and say, “Hey, I really want to interact with you and let you know what’s going on. So just sign up for this list or send me your emails and I’ll be able to contact you directly to let you know about what’s going on.”
Number three, now that you have your communication channels set up, communicate, communicate, communicate. Start making a practice of communicating with your customers so they get trained to know that you actually talk to them. So if you do ask for their email, and you get an email list, something in your store where they’re sending it, or you start collecting it from the way that you check somebody out, or maybe you’re doing that on social media, you start getting some followers, or you’re proactively going out on social media and finding your customers and saying, “Hey, make sure you go like my page.” Whatever you’re doing, start communicating through those channels.
And for anyone that’s going to start doing something like that, it’s always uncomfortable. It was uncomfortable for me the first time I got on camera. It’s uncomfortable the first time you talk to somebody, you were uncomfortable the first time you talked to your wife or husband of 20 years, whatever it is, it’s going to be okay. Start practicing communicating through social media, through your email list, do it over and over again. Even if it’s once, twice a week, start getting used to doing that. Set a reminder on your calendar, that’s when you’re going to reach out. It takes 5 or 10 minutes sometimes just to send a little message out and then your customers actually know, great, they’re open, they’re going to be available. And next time I have an issue, I can actually reach out to them and know that they’re going to be available so that I can get my coffee, my food, my service, my home care service, whatever it could be, I know that they’re going to be around because they’re communicating with me.
Another really great thing about communicating all the time is that when you are hard hit or forced to shut down, or you have some big announcement that you want to do, they’re already used to hearing from you and they trust and like that, that they’ve been hearing from you. So you can do a special, you can do a group buy, you can do any number of two for one, a buy one get one free, whatever the thing might be, is that you can actually get them to do that now, because they’re used to hearing from you. So what a great way to raise some funds and some money or cash flows for your small business in the future when there’s a down month or so, is that you can actually do that. Now you have a list, and they’re used to hearing from you.
So number four, get creative. Now, a lot of businesses had to adjust, figure out how they’re going to stay open. Some were forced to close over the last few months, some businesses are 25 and 50% open now, some were deemed essential, some weren’t. I guess the overall point I’m trying to make is that, it’s a time of trying to survive and thrive, it’s going to require the business owners and entrepreneurs to get a little bit more creative on what they’re doing. So instead of waiting for other people to say, you could be open or not, is there other ways that you can deliver your product or services, even if you were asked to stay at home?
For instance, some of our local businesses here where I live came up with a couple of different solutions. For one, we had a restaurant and there were a high end French restaurant, I really enjoy going there. And a little expensive, so you can only go every once in a while. But letting you pick up to go, the ingredients that were going to be in your special meal. So it created some attention around what they were doing, that you could actually make this great meal at home and have it nice and hot and fresh, and they were doing just special menu items for awhile on that too, so that made it really interesting and creative. It was a way of getting into, “Oh, we can make that at home.” Which was very interesting because a lot of businesses were just delivering their normal products, but this made a creative way of engaging.
Do it yourself kits for home, or gift boxes, coupons, and gift certificates, those kinds of things are already known to a lot of small businesses and retail stores. But gift boxes is a great way. We saw some people putting together some gift boxes of products that were just sitting on their shelves because they weren’t allowed to be open, and they were creating a gift box, and then they would communicate on social media or their email lists and and just send that through the mail to the people at their homes. Some of the things that I saw some hair studios doing were instructional videos. Now this was really interesting because, most of the time you don’t want to cut your own hair, or have someone else do it for you, but I saw some great videos coming out of the Midwest of some hair salons that were actually doing these great do it yourself at home, either colorings, or cuts, or children’s cuts, a lot of great things.
I also saw a donut store out of the Midwest also came up with a great suggestion of how you can make your own donuts at home for the brief period, I think it was about two or three weeks at that particular area was forced to have things closed, so they had these recipes, told you the ingredients and you could make these fun things at home with your family. Business owners, entrepreneurs, we’ve always had to be creative, we’ve always had to be resilient, get creative, come up with solutions and ideas and be proactive about it before the next thing happens or comes or recession comes, whatever it is, make sure that you’re out there as much as you can, and you have so many different channels to deliver your products or services to your customers.
Now this brings up my point number five, which is you need the ability to be able to transact online. And what I mean by this, it means you need to be able to send somebody an email, and in that email is a link and maybe you have a special offer or you’re doing something that you’re trying to get them to come into your stores again, a coupon, or maybe it’s just a regular time of the year where it’s a seasonal thing that you’re letting them know about, and you want them to purchase a gift certificate, coupon, or do that purchase online, so you can maybe mail the product to them, or it’s a different type of service delivery, whatever it is, you need to be able to let them swipe or enter in their information and pay you online.
There’s so many ways to do that now, Facebook has ways to do that, you can do it through Google pay now, there’s things like PayPal, there’s Stripe, there’s any number of online processors now, whatever the favorite one is, even your bank has a merchant services department sometimes that has the ability for you to collect credit card information online, they even give you a little code or it’s just a link sometimes that takes you to a page, whatever it is, there’s tons of ways to do that now.
So in the future, if you get stuck, now you’ve done the thing of you updating your website all the time, you have your list already started, you’re communicating with them through the communication channels that you set up and they’re used to hearing from you and trusting your voice, then you send them out a coupon, or a discount, or something that they can purchase online, and you make it as easy as they can click on the button, purchase it from, and you can collect the money to your bank account, now you’re cooking. Now you’re coming up with ways that you’re mitigating that risk of when things shut down, but also just in the normal course of being a small business owner, you’re also reducing your exposure to just other fluke things that hit every business owner. You can communicate with your people and collect money online, it’s going to help you survive and thrive during this time as well.
The last thing on my list, number six is learn. Now what I mean by learn it’s like, “Okay, I’m learning enough and I just need to get my business open and to get going again, I need to get customers.” Now, over the last couple of months, has been a perfect time, if you didn’t take advantage of it, to have started learning some of the things that are going to help your business going forward. Now, everything that I mentioned before, steps one through five may cause you to have to do something that you’re uncomfortable with or that you’ve never done before. But let me tell you one thing, small business owners and entrepreneurs are one of the most resilient bunch of people that I’ve ever met. These are people who are constantly overcoming obstacles, are constantly coming up with new and inventive ways of taking care of problems that come up and getting a solution to that.
So, don’t tell me that you don’t have the ability to probably go and look at a couple of videos or read a blog post. I’m not saying it has to be within your wheelhouse, I’m just saying you should know enough that you can make decisions for your business on your website, on what communication channels you might want to use, or even what communication you’re going to be sending out there. You, as the business owner, as the lead in your business, you should be more involved with all of those aspects, and now’s a brilliant time in history to be able to learn some of that. It’s also a good time to figure out you like watching videos, or you like listening to a podcast, I put on podcasts all the time, I’ll be doing something I need to do or even driving, when you’re driving somewhere, it’s a 15 minute drive, I throw on a podcast, and I’m learning constantly. We have so many things available to us right now that we can learn.
It’s also a great time to figure out what communication methods you like to get your information from. So some people like podcasts, some put videos on, when I’m washing the dishes, I’ll put a video on my iPad in front of me or my phone, I’ll be listening to a podcast with my earbuds on, when I’m driving somewhere. And I can learn something that I wasn’t able to pick up before a little bit more easily that way. Some people like reading, they want something to read before they go to bed. And you can look at your blog post on the subject, whether it’s putting together an email list, how to write an email, how to set up a social media account. All of these things are available now, and learning is a really awesome way to do that. When I could have just said, “This is something that’s going to help my business, help me make my business a little bit more COVID or recession proof.” And it makes it a little bit easier.
So I just want you to know that I’m here for you and I’m going to be doing a lot more videos on different types of subjects that are going to help small businesses become resilient and to be able to make COVID proof and recession proof, by mastering some of the tools that are available to them online. I want you to know you’re strong, you’re able, and you’re very resilient. You can make it through so much and you’ve made it through so much already to get to where you’re at right now. So thanks for watching, please comment or subscribe to the channel, if you like what you heard. Please share a comment below and let me know what made sense to you or what felt like it was long and rambly, sorry I get that way on some of my subjects. But take care, stay strong, stay safe, and we’ll see you on the next one. Thank you.
